Andrew Ross Sorkin speaks with Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg in the course of the Recent York Times DealBook Summit within the Appel Room on the Jazz At Lincoln Center in Recent York City, Nov. 30, 2022.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
Facebook users within the U.K., France and Germany will not see a dedicated section for news articles starting in December.
Meta said Tuesday that it’s plans to “deprecate” the Facebook News tab in early December for users in those European countries as “a part of an ongoing effort to higher align our investments to our services and products people value essentially the most.”
The corporate added that it plans to spend more money and time on short-form video, as best exemplified by its TikTok-like Reels product. News represents lower than 3% of what people see of their Facebook feeds, Meta said.
Meta said it will honor the Facebook News obligations it had made to publishers in those countries, but said it won’t enter into recent deals and has no plans to supply recent products for news publishers.
Meta debuted Facebook News in 2019, saying on the time that the product “was built to bring people closer to the stories that affect their lives.”
The choice to deprecate Facebook News is an element of a broader move away from the news business. The corporate recently shut down access to news on Facebook and Instagram in Canada after its government passed the Online News Act, which requires tech firms to pay content fees to media outlets within the country.
Meta disagreed with the Canadian law, saying that “the laws misrepresents the worth news outlets receive when selecting to make use of our platforms” and that it’s “based on the inaccurate premise that Meta advantages unfairly from news content shared on our platforms.”
Some news experts criticized Meta’s decision to dam users from viewing or posting news links in Canada, saying it could lead on to an increase of misinformation and negatively affect local news organizations.
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